Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @10:51AM
from the panties-in-a-bunch dept.

Bennett Haselton has writes
"In recent
arguments over the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection
Act, both sides have argued over the efficiency of Internet blocking
software. While COPA would prohibit
commercial U.S. websites from publishing freely
available material that is "harmful to minors", the ACLU has argued that
blocking software is a far more effective alternative, since among other
things it can block porn sites located overseas, non-commercial websites,
and p2p programs, all of which are beyond the reach of COPA. On the other
hand, we had the surreal experience of watching the Department of Justice
lawyer arguing in favor of a censorship law by saying that the blocking
software alternative was unfair to children -- because it blocked too much
legitimate material." The rest of Bennett's essay follows.

"For example," said DOJ attorney Eric Beane during opening arguments, "one
filter even blocked a website promoting a marathon to raise funds for
breast cancer research. Part of the CIA's World Fact Book was
blocked. And a page with an ACLU calendar. [Blocking software blocks] a
significant portion of other materials on the World Wide Web, materials
that in many cases are necessary for a child to complete his
homework." (Opening
arguments transcript, p. 37.) As someone who has been publishing critiques of blocking software for
years, I read those words and felt like cheering, despite the fact that I'm
sitting in the other side's fan section for this match. (Beane is right,
but he's missing the point, which is that whatever problems exist with
blocking software, are minor compared to the problems with COPA -- because
blocking software raises no constitutional issues when it's used by a
private party in their own house, whereas COPA affects everyone in the
U.S.)

The irony, of course, is that three years ago, in the trial over the
similarly-named Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) which required
blocking software in all schools and libraries that receive federal funds,
it was the ACLU pointing out the flaws in blocking software and the
Department of Justice claiming that blocking software was accurate and
effective.

At first it would seem that both sides are now guilty of
flip-flopping. But reviewing what was said then and what was said now, my
conclusion is that the ACLU did nothing more than shift their focus to a
different set of facts, while the government did contradict
themselves. And the source of this seeming flip-flop actually comes down
to something pretty simple: two different ways of stating one set of
numbers.

Now before going further I can't resist saying that I think the whole
debate over "harmful to minors" material is pretty silly, because I don't
think the pro-censorship side has ever put forth a reason why they think
that pictures of naked people, or even people having sex with each other,
are harmful to people under 18. I disagree with some people on matters
like abortion and the death penalty, but I at least think they have
some facts on their side; but I don't know of any facts
supporting people who think that pornography is dangerous. Why is a
woman's nipple harmful but a man's nipple isn't? How are the majority of
high school students who have already had sex anyway, supposed to be harmed
by pictures of other people having sex? And apart from the logical
paradoxes, the pervasiveness of the Internet has now given us empirical
data too: virtually all minors have now have access to anything they want
to get on the Internet (either at home, or by sneaking to a friend's
house), and where's the evidence that adolescents' brains have been
hormonally turned to mush any more than they always have been?

But for the remainder of the discussion, suppose you're addressing people
who believe that nudity and sexual material really are harmful to people
under 18. (In any case, the judges probably believe it, and even if they
don't, they're bound by legal precedents that assume as much.) The
question is how accurately blocking software achieves this goal.

Blocking software has two types of error rates: underblocking (failure to
block porn sites) and overblocking (blocking of non-pornographic
sites). Underblocking errors are usually expressed one way: the percentage
of porn sites in a given sample that are not blocked. But overblocking
errors can be stated in two ways: the percentage of non-porn sites that are
blocked, or the percentage of blocked sites that are not
pornographic. (There are borderline cases like nude art sites, but it
turns out they're not common enough to affect the margin of error much; the
vast majority of sites are either clearly porn or clearly not.)

The key is that if you want the overblocking rate to sound low, you talk
about the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked. If you want it to
sound high, you talk about the percentage of blocked sites that are
non-porn.

For example, in the 2003 Supreme Court arguments over CIPA, Department of
Justice attorney Theodore Olson downplayed the error
rates of blocking software by saying:

"But even if it's tens of thousands of the -- of the 2 billion pages of
material that is on the Internet, we're talking about one two-hundredths of
1 percent, even if it's 100,000, of materials would be blocked."

Here he's referring to the percentage of non-porn sites that are
filtered. Attorney Paul Smith, arguing against the law, countered:

"And so we have -- on these lists is a proportion, a huge proportion,
perhaps 25, perhaps 50 percent of the sites that are blocked that are not
illegal even for children."

and:

"And the evidence is that there's about 11 million websites on the
Internet, in --in the accessible part of the Internet and that 100,000 of
those are the sexually explicit ones and that the --there are at least tens
of thousands more that are on the list. So it's --the Government also says
in their brief that about one percent of the Internet is over- blocked,
which would be about 100,000 sites. So it is a substantial percentage. It
is also a substantial amount. And most importantly, it's a very large
percentage of what they're blocking is not what they intend to block."

-- that is, talking about the percentage of blocked sites that were
non-pornographic. Both sides cited the same figure (100,000
non-pornographic sites blocked, apparently referring to an average across
all blocking programs) -- but that same number could be seen as an "error
rate" of either one hundredth of one percent, or 50%, depending on which
formula you use.

Then in this year's COPA trial, the ACLU called CMU professor Lorrie Faith
Cranor who testified that in tests that she reviewed,

"[blocking software programs] correctly blocked an average of approximately
92 percent of objectionable content. And they incorrectly blocked an
average of 4 percent of content not matching the test criteria."

(Oct. 24th
transcript, p. 57.) Back to talking about the percentage of non-porn
sites that are blocked -- which, again, when you put it that way, sounds
low. On the other hand, although I couldn't find exact numbers cited by
the DOJ's lawyers on the number of sites that were incorrectly blocked, in
the portions of his opening argument quoted above, Eric Beane focused on
the sad fact of the sites that were blocked -- not the fact that
they comprised only a tiny fraction of sites on the Web. The two sides
simply swapped formulas.

As for Peacefire's own studies over the years of
blocking software error rates, one of the legitimate criticisms that could
be made about our efforts was that we focused almost exclusively on the
second number, the percentage of blocked sites that were non-porn. If you
were interested in how blocking software actually affects the surfing
experience of minors who are forced to use it, perhaps you would focus more
on the first number, the percentage of non-porn sites that are
blocked. Perhaps, you might say, that as an organization addressing the
blocking software issue specifically from a minors' rights point of view,
we really should have focused on that number quite a bit! But I did get a
bit preoccupied with playing "gotcha" with the blocking companies, focusing
on the percentage of blocked sites that were obvious mistakes, because it
was frankly too much fun publicizing the absurdly high error rates of their
programs, which belied the claims made by most blocking companies that all
sites on their blacklist were examined by a human at their company before
being added. (Although it seems to have done some good -- as far as I
know, no blocking company is making that claim about their product today.)

The error rates were indeed absurdly high; we took a sample of the first
1,000 .com domains in an alphabetical list, ran them through several
programs, and found that of the sites blocked, between 20% and 80% (!) were
errors. (The median error rate was about 50%, which corresponds to the
figure given by Paul Smith in the CIPA trial oral arguments quoted
above.) This surprised even critics of blocking software, and skeptics
complained that we must have made mistakes or simply fudged the
numbers. (The whole point of using the first 1,000 .com domains was that
if we had used a random sample and gotten error rates like that, we could
have been accused of "stacking the deck" and using a fake random sample
that was loaded with known errors and not truly random.) Years later, it
came out that the companies whose products we'd tested, had been following
a policy that if they found an objectionable site on a given IP address,
all sites on that IP would be blocked, on the theory that hosting companies
often group porn sites together on the same machine. Trouble was, while
this may have often been true for bona fide porn sites, it was not true for
most sites that featured just an incidental shot of someone's bare breasts
or a large amount of profanity -- but this would also be enough to get all
sites blocked at a given IP. So the 80% error rate was about what you'd
expect after all.

You might think that a product with an 80% error rate could never survive
in the marketplace, but consider who was buying the software. On the one
hand, you had schools and companies buying the programs -- but they didn't
care whether it worked so much as they cared about being able to show, for
liability reasons, that they did something. On the other hand, you
had parents who really did care about keeping porn off their computer --
but how many parents really did any thorough testing of the product, other
than making sure it blocks the obvious sites like Playboy.com? A serious
test could take days. Their kids are the only ones who would end up doing
any thorough "testing" of the product, and if they found a way around it,
it's not likely that they would tell their parents. With no market
pressure to fix problems, an 80% error rate wasn't really surprising.

But even the most vocal critics of blocking software only pointed out that
blocking software sometimes blocked sites about plumbing, or soccer,
or aluminum siding; we never claimed that most of those sites would
be blocked. Even with our high numbers of wrongly blocked sites, if they
had been expressed as a percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked, they
would have still sounded like a "low error rate".

The moral is, always keep track of what the "error rate" refers to in these
debates. By moving around a few variables in a formula, the Department of
Justice was able to go from saying in 2003 that blocking software was
minimally intrusive, to making a speech in 2006 that made blocking software
sound so tragically limiting that you could practically hear the violins
playing. (I know, people who live in glass houses... *ahem*)

And what about the ACLU? If the Department of Justice is guilty of
flip-flopping, from saying in 2003 that blocking software is a reasonable
and narrowly tailored solution, to saying in 2006 that it's clumsy,
ineffective, and overbroad, is the ACLU guilty of flip-flopping in the
opposite direction?

Actually, the ACLU's position has always been consistent: blocking software
has First Amendment problems when used in a school or library, due to
overblocking and underblocking errors, but if used in the home it is still
a lot more effective than a law like COPA, which would score pathetically
on the same scale. As ACLU attorney Chris Hansen stated in opening
arguments:

"COPA does not reach the 50% of all speech that is overseas... Filters are
the most effective. Almost all of the filters that [expert witness] Mr.
Mewett tested were at least 95% effective. Think about the 5%
ineffectiveness compared to where we start with COPA being 50%
ineffective..."

(Opening
arguments, p. 22. Note: Chris Hansen has confirmed that the
official transcript is wrong; it has him saying "35%" instead of "95%",
which wouldn't make any sense.) As for overbreadth, COPA would
criminalize speech by adults, intended for adults, something that no
blocking program could ever do -- and as for minimizing collateral damage
to innocent sites, does anyone think that even if COPA is upheld, parents
will throw out their blocking software?

Even though the ACLU focused on different statistics in the two trials, in
both cases they were focusing on the numbers that were relevant to the
issue. When talking about constitutional problems with blocking software
in schools and libraries, the percentage of blocked sites that are
incorrectly blocked, is important, because it's their First
Amendment rights that are at issue. The DOJ lawyer talking about all the
sites that weren't blocked, was missing the point. If your site is being
blocked, it hardly matters to you that for every blocked site there are
hundreds that are not. "Hey, your site is not accessible, but don't worry,
your competitors' sites are!"

On the other hand, when talking about the use of blocking software in the
home, the publisher's First Amendment rights are not at issue; the issues
that most parents would care about, are how effective it is, and whether
most clean sites are still accessible. Well of course most of them
are. Blocking software is not that bad.

Confused? The option to just stop making a big deal out of porn on the
Internet is looking better all the time, isn't it?

Let's start by getting a few things straight.
According to recent numbers about just how many web pages there are on the Internet, the statistic that only 1% of those pages contain pornographic material means that there are over 600 million pages with pornographic content. That is definitely a problem.
As to Puls4r's statement that this is primarily a religious or moral issue I say examine the facts. Studies show that pornography is one of the most addictive substances known to man. We have passed law after law to protect minors from addictive substances like alcohol, tobacco and other drugs - but done nothing to protect them from Internet pornography.
We are raising a generation of porn and sex addicts, which may very well lead to an increase in deviant sexual behavior. Teens growing up with pornography develop unhealthy and incorrect attitudes about sex, women and relationships in general. Some studies show that eventually porn addicts may turn off to relationships altogether because they are incapable of having a normal, healthy relationship.
I agree COPA may not be the way to go - but something needs to be done. The problem with Internet pornography goes far beyond any religious or moral debate. We must have a solution that protects minors and un-wanting consumers, but that allows adults to access the legal content they want. I've found something that looks like it could work - www.cp80.org.

An adult on 17-year-old with mature critical thinking skills isn't going to be screwed up by a Holocaust denial site. An eight-year-old? You'd better have spent a lot of effort getting that eight-year-old to be skeptical, the effort might not work, and what school is going to train their students to question bad reasoning and arguments from authority? They'd put themselves out of business.

Anyone who gets their ideas about sex from mainstream porn will wind up seriously off the mark. Real women are based on carbon compounds, not silicon compounds(*). Real lovemaking has little in common with porn film activities. And I bet you wouldn't have to be on porn sites for long to find something genuinely contemptuous toward women. A line is crossed when the site starts calling them "bitches".

(*) Silicones, with an e, are silicon compounds. Specifically they're a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms with alkyl side groups.